


Don't Hesitate

by iaminarage



Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Canon typical alcohol use, First Kiss, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Sort Of, kegster, struggling to remember details of the previous night
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-29 11:38:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,226
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15728643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iaminarage/pseuds/iaminarage
Summary: When Dex wakes up after the latest big Kegster, he can’t find Nursey, and he has a feeling that there’s something he should remember.





	Don't Hesitate

**Author's Note:**

> The fic title comes from Mary Oliver’s ["Don’t Hesitate"](http://structureandstyle.org/post/71905788555/dont-hesitate). Because apparently I have to name all of my nerseydex fic after Mary Oliver poems. The inspiration for this fic was a [text from last night](http://www.textsfromlastnight.com/Text-Replies-74842.html), but it got away from me.

The first thing Dex registered as he woke up was a strange smell. It smelled like some combination of the SMH locker room, pizza sauce, and cheap beer. It was a distinctly familiar smell, but Dex couldn’t place it. He knew that all he needed to do to figure out where he’d fallen asleep was to open his eyes, but this was not Dex’s first rodeo. He knew full well that once he opened his eyes, he’d be subjecting himself to The Light, and that was a stunningly terrible idea.

He ran his fingers over his sleeping surface and realized that it had a velvety sort of feel to it, but the fibers were stuck down in some places. It was definitely a soft place to sleep, but it was lumpy in odd places. 

Finally he stretched his legs from their curled up position and hit the bottom of his makeshift bed. Now he knew where he was.

“The couch!” He exclaimed, shockingly loud in the silence, which, until then had been punctuated only by light snores.

“Broooooo,” he heard Wicks groan. “Shut up. Your voice feels like a chainsaw.”

Dex wanted to protest, but his voice did sound a bit like a chainsaw just at this exact moment.

Dex shifted a bit and pulled the couch pillow in tighter, trying not to think about what foul things might have been done in the presence of said pillow. As he dozed, the night came slowly back into focus. It had been the Valentine’s Day/Nursey’s Birthday/Mercilessly Crushing Vermont Kegster. 

Although the Kegster was officially in celebration of his birthday, Dex had considered it a reasonable possibility that Nursey would be in one of his melancholy moods. In their third year of being--well, friends was a strong word to describe all three of those years--being people who knew each other, Dex had pretty much figured out that Nursey didn’t much like his birthday. Or at least he didn’t like that it was on Valentine’s Day. Dex had always thought that made a certain amount of sense. It made your birthday a lot less special if everyone always had plans with their significant other. 

Dex probably should have been on Nursey patrol since he was single and Nursey’s roommate, but Bitty had taken over since Jack was on a West Coast Ross trip and Samwell had a game, so there was no way for them to see each other. 

It had taken Dex a while to find Nursey at the kegster, which wasn’t usual these days. Now that he and Nursey were really friends, they tended to spend parties together, but not this one. When he did find Nursey, he had to have been several rounds of tub juice in and he seemed out of control. Like he’d lost track of his famous chill and was just going full throttle. He’d laughed, draping his arms around Bitty and challenging a couple of soccer players to beer pong, but there had been something hard in his eyes when he’d seen Dex. 

Was that the only time he’d seen Nursey last night? Dex blinked his eyes open suddenly and immediately regretted it as the light flooding through the Haus windows made his head feel like it was going to explode. But Dex couldn’t remember seeing Nursey again after he’d started playing beer pong, and the Haus wasn’t big enough for that to make sense. 

Dex groaned as he dragged himself to a sitting position and waited a second for his spinning head to catch up. How much tub juice had he had last night? He didn’t think he’d been that drunk when he’d seen Nursey. When he stood up, he had to grab the arm of the couch for a second as he tried to tell his stomach to calm down. He looked around the room and sighed. This was going to be an unpleasant mess in a few hours, but he wasn’t even going to bother until more of the team was awake.

Getting up the stairs to his room was slow going, but he made it up without incident. He opened the door and checked the bottom bunk to see if Nursey was up, but Nursey’s bunk was empty. The obviously un-slept-in bed sent a quick shock of anxiety through Dex, which didn’t make any sense. Nursey had probably just gone home with someone. It wasn’t exactly uncommon for Nursey to find someone interesting or exciting at a party and end up sleeping somewhere else, which Dex was committed to pretending didn’t bother him; it just hadn’t happened much over the last few months. 

But there was something else. Something in the back of Dex’s mind trying to get his attention. Something had happened last night that made Dex think Nursey hadn’t gone home with someone else. He just couldn’t for the life of him pick it out of the blur of tub juice and beer pong and dancing with his friends and strangers and feeling just a little bit on top of the world. 

Dex pulled his phone out of his pocket. Thankfully, it still had 40% battery left. He just hoped that Nursey’s wasn’t dead.

“Where are you?” he texted.

He stared at his phone for a minute before he finally convinced himself that staring wasn’t going to make Nursey text him. Instead, he stepped into their bathroom so that he could try to get his mouth to stop tasting like something crawled into it and died.

When he caught sight of himself in the mirror, he flinched. He looked pretty much as terrible as he felt. At least he could kill some time waiting for Nursey to answer by trying to make himself look a little bit alive.

Dex’s phone pinged when he was rinsing out his hair, and he nearly fell out of the shower trying to get to it. When he saw that it was Nursey, he felt himself relax. 

“I woke up on the hammock spooning a box of Cheese Itz.” Dex couldn’t help but laugh at the image. 

He probably could have just waited for Nursey to make his way upstairs, but that something was still tickling the edges of his memory, making him feel like getting to Nursey was an emergency, so he grabbed the first t-shirt and sweatpants he could find and thundered down the stairs, drawing a loud, “SHUT UP!” from Ollie in the living room as he raced through. 

He rocketed onto the porch before it occurred to him that he should probably have pretended that he wasn’t running to find Nursey in a completely unnecessary panic. 

He found Nursey exactly as described, laying in the hammock, his cheeks inexplicably covered in glitter which shined in the February sun, a box of Cheese Itz clutched in his arms, and still somehow looking impossibly beautiful. 

“Aren’t you cold?” Dex asked. “It’s freezing out here.”

“I think I had a blanket until I woke up,” Nursey replied, indicating the sharks quilt on the floor of the porch which could only have come from Chowder’s room, although Dex couldn’t imagine how that would have happened.

“You look like hell, Dexy,” Nursey said.

“Thanks a lot,” Dex replied, running a hand through his damp hair, his sarcasm almost on autopilot. “You look like a disco ball.”

Something about the glitter on Nursey’s face was tickling that memory again. Nursey sparkling under the lights on the dance floor, and Dex’s hands, covered in glitter under the harsh, sobering lights of the downstairs bathroom. 

Dex sat on the edge of the porch and grabbed his head. It hurt so much, and he just couldn’t put the pieces together. 

Then he felt Nursey’s hand on his shoulder as he dropped down to sit next to Dex. And the feel of Nursey’s warm hand through his thin t-shirt finally triggered the memory. 

“Oh God,” Dex said, his voice barely above a whisper. “You kissed me.”

“Yep,” Nursey said, popping the p as his hand fell from Dex’s shoulder. “And you ran away. So… sorry for doing that.”

“Oh  _ God _ ,” Dex said again. Because all of a sudden the memories had come back, and Dex could relive them in perfect, technicolor clarity. 

He’d felt like Nursey was avoiding him the whole night, but when he’d finally cornered Nursey on the dance floor, somehow covered in glitter and dancing like nobody was watching, Nursey had acted happy to see him, draping his arms around Dex’s neck and dancing in close to him. Dex couldn’t dance like Nursey, he didn’t move easily to the music like that, but he’d tried gamely. He’d been confused but happy to have Nursey with him, smiling at him, touching him. 

Then they’d locked eyes, and Nursey had leaned in and kissed him. And for a second, he felt like his heart was going to explode. Like everything he’d tried not to want had found him anyways and it was amazing. And then it felt like the floor melted under his feet and the room was spinning, but not in a good way. He’d pulled away from Nursey and run. 

“Nursey, shit. I didn’t run away from you.” Dex ran his hand through his hair. “God, this is so embarrassing. I threw up.”

Nursey turned to him wide eyed. “I’m honestly not sure if that’s supposed to make me feel better or worse.” But his posture relaxed obviously. 

Dex shook his head. “I didn’t throw up because you kissed me. I was  _ drunk _ .”

“I have to have the worst timing of any human being on earth,” Nursey said with a laugh, leaning back on his hands and staring at the porch ceiling. “I’ve been falling for you for a year, and my genius drunk brain decides to kiss you ten seconds before you barf?”

“Apparently,” Dex replied with a grin, and then his brain caught up with Nursey’s statement. “Wait, you what?”

Nursey shrugged self consciously. “Yeah, about that. That’s kind of why I was avoiding you last night.”

“Because you like me?” 

“It was Valentine’s Day and my birthday, and just like always, all of my friends had big plans for how to make the day special with their significant other. And every time someone mentioned it, all I could think of was how much I wanted to spend it with you.”

“Okay,” Dex said, feeling completely befuddled as always by Nursey’s logic. “So why didn’t you spend it with me?”

Nursey sighed. “Because I didn’t want to be your drunk roommate who needs a babysitter. I wanted to be the person you wanted to spend Valentine’s Day with.”

Dex shook his head and didn’t even attempt to hide his smile. “You were. You have been. For more than one Valentine’s Day.”

Nursey just stared at him for a moment. “You’re not serious.”

“Serious as the heart attack I nearly had when a stupid coin told me I had to be roommates with one of my best friends who I also happened to have a giant crush on,” Dex replied with a shrug. He and Nursey had never really talked about the dib flip that had landed them in the same room. It was too emotionally complicated, and by the time they’d come back for the fall, they’d been texting all summer and had just avoided any discussion. It was borderline miraculous in Dex’s book, because he’d had absolutely no explanation of his behavior to give Nursey at the time. 

Nursey’s eyes went wide. “Are you kidding me?  _ That’s _ why you flipped a shit?”

“Yeah, I kinda figured that being roommates with me would be a huge turn off.”

Now Dex could see Nursey starting to smile, too. “Well, it didn’t work. Like, at all.”

Dex took a deep breath, steeling himself even though he already knew how Nursey felt. “So, I know I messed up our first kiss. But could we have a do over?”

Nursey just grinned and wrapped his arms around Dex’s waist, pulling him in close, and kissed him. And Dex felt the same feeling as last night, like he was a balloon whose strings had been cut and the only things holding him down to earth were Nursey’s hands and lips. Like the rush when the buzzer sounds and he’s won the big game or the feeling of signing his name to his letter of intent for Samwell or the first time he’d tasted Bitty’s cherry pie warm from the oven. Absolute joy. And this time there was nothing to ruin the moment. 

They kissed for Dex didn’t know how long, until they were finally interrupted by the porch door opening and Bitty’s voice saying, “Oh my goodness!”

The pulled away from each other a bit sheepishly, and Dex could feel himself blushing flaming red as he looked up at Bitty. “Well, that’s certainly not how I expected this conversation to go!” Bitty said with a grin. “Anyways, breakfast is ready. I made omelets.”

“We’ll be right there. Thanks, Bitty,” Nursey replied. Neither of them was about to miss Bitty’s omelets. 

As they stood up and dusted themselves off, both of them grinning like idiots, Dex looked down at his hands and realized they were covered in glitter again. Then Nursey slipped his hand into Dex’s and pulled him into the Haus for breakfast.  

**Author's Note:**

> If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,  
> don’t hesitate. Give in to it. There are plenty  
> of lives and whole towns destroyed or about  
> to be. We are not wise, and not very often  
> kind. And much can never be redeemed.  
> Still, life has some possibility left. Perhaps this  
> is its way of fighting back, that sometimes  
> something happens better than all the riches  
> or power in the world. It could be anything,  
> but very likely you notice it in the instant  
> when love begins. Anyway, that’s often the  
> case. Anyway, whatever it is, don’t be afraid  
> of its plenty. Joy is not made to be a crumb.
> 
> –Mary Oliver


End file.
